CHAPTER
Thirty-Four
IN THE SUMMER OF 1983, WHILE NERVOUSLY AWAITING publication of The Anatomy Lesson, Roth met Ross Miller at their friend Philip Grausman’s house in Litchfield County. The thirty-seven-year-old Miller was an English professor at the University of Connecticut in Storrs—a little over an hour’s drive from Warren—and a year after their first meeting, he wrote Roth a letter praising The Anatomy Lesson, which he’d found “emotionally real”; he proceeded to explain what the book was about (“self-reconstruction”) and assured the author that he valued it enormously. Starved for kind words of whatever sort about the maligned conclusion to his Zuckerman Trilogy, Roth promptly invited Miller to Warren so they could get better acquainted.
Roth learned that Ross was the son of Arthur Miller’s older brother, Kermit, a decorated veteran of World War II who’d dropped out of college to work in his father’s carpet business—this while Arthur distanced himself from the family, finished college, became a world-famous playwright and his parents’ hero. Some say Kermit was the model for Victor Franz, the angry brother in Arthur’s The Price, whose sacrifice on his family’s behalf had made his brother’s “whole life possible,” as Victor saw it, and “strangled” his own. “Kermit was the second banana to Arthur,” said Roth, “and then Ross picked up all his resentment against Arthur. Tremendous resentment.” Ross, for his part, claimed it was Arthur who “carried the sibling rivalry right to his grave,” whereas his honorable war-hero father was “contemptuous” of Arthur, “a fabricator” who once told Bellow (said Ross) an outlandish story about how Kermit had invented the electric car.
Roth’s friendship with Ross was sealed when he canvassed the younger man’s opinion of an early draft of The Counterlife. Ross scribbled “a pile of notes on every page,” then phoned Roth and said, “I have bad news. There’s a good book in here somewhere.” The two subsequently met in Roth’s studio and talked for some thirteen hours; as Miller liked to say ever after, “I’d never talked to anybody this long and intense and didn’t get laid.” (“The funniest thing I ever heard him say,” said Roth, who added: “I don’t think it’s true.”) “His intelligence is precise and he knows how to elicit precision from an interlocutor or adversary,” Roth wrote of Miller in one of his recommendation letters. “He is a writer and a teacher of enormous seriousness—and, for the record, a most loyal and devoted friend.” Indeed, Miller became Roth’s steadiest companion amid the increasing loneliness of Connecticut. Both men were unhappy with their mates, and found solace in long literary dinners at the Hopkins Inn, on Lake Waramaug, or in watching baseball and chatting about women.
ROTH HAD ANOTHER marathon session over The Counterlife with his editor, David Rieff, who came to the Wyndham Hotel one afternoon in February 1986 and listened to Roth read the fourth draft aloud to him, word for word, for almost nine hours. Whenever Rieff heard something that was slightly off (“ambiguous, cheap, whatever,” said Roth) he would speak up; otherwise he kept silent, and never once, it seemed to Roth, made an idle remark. It was a profound and delightful experience for both men, and later Roth was struck by how strong Rieff’s influence had been on his thinking, from start to finish, while he wrote the book: “There’s something there in the sustained intellectual energy that derives from my sense of your appetite for that kind of stuff. So I am grateful, maybe even more than you can know.”
For once Roth was wholly satisfied with his work (“I gave it my all”), though he dreaded the usual misreadings. Of course he knew he’d be labeled “experimental” and “postmodern” and so forth—both disparagingly and not—and was already impatient toward such reduction. The Counterlife proposed alternative possibilities, and its discrete episodes were not linked in a causal way, but otherwise the book was a scrupulously realistic meditation (“no phantasmagoria, no surrealism”) on what makes for a meaningful life, touching on all of Roth’s great concerns. “These flesh-and-blood talkers coming apart in your hands, turning into rack and mist, letters of the alphabet!” Cynthia Ozick, an early reader, enthused. “What an imagining, what art, what schemings, what wizardry, what a piece of work!”
Lehmann-Haupt described the novel as “experimental” in his first sentence, and wondered how the reader could take seriously, say, the crazy anti-Semitic ravings of Maria Freshfield’s sister—since, after all, she and other characters were merely whimsical figments of Roth’s imagination, and the opposite could happen in some other chapter. “Apparently not yet recovered from the shock of having his earlier novels, especially Portnoy’s Complaint, taken literally by the American reading public, Mr. Roth is determined to prove in as many ways as possible that autobiographical fiction, no matter how seemingly personal, is not the same thing as confession.” (“To my father at eighty-five,” the novel’s dedication reads, establishing yet again that Roth’s father, unlike Zuckerman’s, is still alive.) More happily, William Gass (with some atonement, perhaps, for his caustic treatment of The Great American Novel) called the book “magnificent” and “a triumph” in the Sunday Times.
“Radical change is the law of life,” Roth had written in his notes for The Counterlife, which he considered “very much a work by a middle-aged writer” given that “ideas of renewal and the possibility of change are a kind of leitmotif of middle age.” Zuckerman’s brother, Henry, an ostensibly well-adjusted dentist and family man, finds himself in such a dismal rut that he plumps for life-threatening bypass surgery rather than suffer the impotence caused by a beta-blocker and thus deprive himself of his assistant Wendy’s blow jobs. Nathan, to whom Henry confides his dilemma, is rueful but only too comprehending when his brother does in fact die for the sake of a little “juicy pleasure”: “It was your drop of theatrical existence, your disorder, your escapade, your risk, your little daily insurrection against all your overwhelming virtues—debauching Wendy for twenty minutes a day, then home at night for the temporal satisfactions of ordinary family life.” Or so Nathan imagines at least one version of his dull-seeming brother’s life—an “irresponsible exaggeration,” as Henry himself considers it, when he raids his brother’s study in a subsequent chapter, “Gloucestershire,” and finds a manuscript much like the novel we’re reading. In “Gloucestershire,” Nathan is the one who dies from a risky bypass (“He, not me, would never accept the limits,” the indignant Henry reflects, “—he, not me, was the fool who died for a fuck”), whereupon Henry attends his funeral and endures a eulogy praising the “exploitative aspects of Carnovsky,” the book that made such a mockery of Jewish virtue and destroyed their family. Afterward, while rifling his brother’s manuscripts, Henry discovers various drafts of that same eulogy—“all of it, text and corrections, in no one’s hand but Nathan’s” (a task one can easily imagine Roth undertaking on his own posthumous behalf)—as well as the present novel’s second chapter, “Judea,” in which Henry, to his horror, finds himself “brought back from the dead for a second drubbing.”
“We are all writing fictitious versions of our lives all the time,” said Roth, “contradictory but mutually entangling stories that, however subtly or grossly falsified, constitute our hold on reality and are the closest thing we have to the truth.” Nathan Zuckerman—who once overheard the staid Lonoff mimicking Jimmy Durante for a fetching young mistress—knows that everyday life has a way of outstripping even the grossest falsifications. Thus, in “Judea,” his brother Henry survives his bypass operation and heads to Israel, where he recovers his potency, in every sense, with a momentous epiphany: “I am nothing, I have never been anything, the way that I am this Jew.” Reinventing himself as a pistol-packing settler on the West Bank, Henry abandons the self-absorbed pettiness of his old life—his willingness to risk death for a blow job—and joins the great history-changing project of his leader, Mordecai Lippman.
Israel then is the embodiment of Roth’s theme of reversal and change—a nation of Jews tending to aggression and vengeance—and hence the Israel chapters, with their emphasis on politics and history, are regarded by some as a milestone in Roth’s work. “It was as if he regained the world as a subject,” said Solotaroff. “He started going back to the past with a purpose beyond ‘Let’s see what it was like when I was thirty.’ ” Of course the process was well under way with The Prague Orgy, though Updike, for one, thought both works were a little too mechanically polemical—“The conversations deteriorate into blocks of talk, one babbled essay after another”—a defect that would if anything become more pronounced until, finally, in certain parts of the American Trilogy, rival viewpoints are more seamlessly subsumed into the narrative. Meanwhile, in The Counterlife, Roth occasionally sacrificed plausibility for the sake of getting his ideas across—as when an Israeli security goon, a self-described “grease monkey,” indulges in erudite historical analysis and literary allusion (“Who’s the little Jew with a cigar in T. S. Eliot’s wonderful poem?”) while lecturing Nathan on “the universal loathing of the Jewish id, and the goy’s half-hidden, justifiable fear of wild, belated Jewish justice.”
Back in Christendom, Nathan falls in love with his dream shiksa, Maria Freshfield, but the idyll ends when he can’t help sweeping her up in a blanket indictment of her family’s—and England’s—ineradicable anti-Semitism. In the crypt of a Gloucestershire church, Maria’s older sister elaborates the nature of her mother’s sordid misgivings where his union with Maria is concerned: “I don’t think she really likes the idea of her languid, helpless Maria submitting to anal domination by a Jew.” Just as Henry discovers his brother’s fictionalized versions of his life, so Maria reads the manuscript of “Christendom” and is repelled by its monstrous distortion of what she’d once told Nathan was her mother’s “touch of anti-Semitism.” Aghast at such a hateful narrative, Maria decides to quit the marriage and indeed the novel itself.
And on this “coyly Pirandelloian” (Updike) point, Lehmann-Haupt was hardly alone in throwing up his hands. “A character in a book within a book deciding to take no further part in the narrative?” wrote Julian Barnes in the London Review of Books. “Not far from here lies preciosity, and perhaps there is a thinning of our interest as overt fictionality stomps on imagined life.” But again, as Roth would have it, truth is what our imaginations make and remake of it, and whatever odious thing Nathan sees fit to make of Maria’s family, in the context of art, is a valid extension of the England he comes to know. As for Maria herself, he (Roth) congratulated himself on having created “the most intelligent woman in American literature since Isabel Archer”—an accomplishment not at all vitiated by Nathan’s conclusion, “There is no you, Maria, any more than there’s a me.”
Give or take the odd quibble, the overall response to The Counterlife was positive bordering on ecstatic, and for a while Roth allowed himself to enjoy it (“a favorable review in Commentary!”). Soon, however, the clouds began to regather, as he decided that what his former detractors had really liked about the book was its relative good manners. “ ‘The deballing of Zuckerman is complete,’ as the bearded fellow says,” he wrote Rieff.* “That’s what their fucking approval is all about. They can shove it.”
Nevertheless he was glad to get the prizes that followed, as they were his first in twenty-eight years and seemed to augur (contra Howe et al.) a promising change in the cultural climate. “You don’t appear to be worried because my book fails to propose a remedy for what is troublesomely Jewish in these lives,” he said, accepting that year’s National Jewish Book Award while noting Chekhov’s formulation that it isn’t the writer’s part “to offer a solution to a problem but, rather, to provide a proper presentation of the problem.” As for that year’s National Book Critics Circle Award in fiction, it came down to a “heated discussion” over the merits of two finalists: The Counterlife and The Bonfire of the Vanities. “Why, that’s lak choosin’ between a flea and a louse,” said the Kentucky-born Elizabeth Hardwick (or so Joel Conarroe, her fellow judge, remembered). Roth prevailed ten votes to six, and, when notified, left a return message on Conarroe’s machine regretting that he’d have to miss the “Circle Jerk Prize” because he’d be in Israel again but would send a tape recording of his acceptance speech. On the appointed evening, then, Roth’s disembodied voice assured the audience once more that he wrote fiction, not confession: “The butcher, imagination, wastes no times with niceties: it clubs the fact over the head, quickly it slits the throat, and then with its bare hands, it pulls forth the guts. . . . By the time the imagination is finished with a fact, believe me, it bears no resemblance to a fact.”
IN LATE APRIL 1986, Roth went with his friend Gaia Servadio to hear Primo Levi give a talk at the Italian Cultural Institute in Belgrave Square; Roth considered Levi’s Survival in Auschwitz† “a masterpiece for ten different reasons” and had long wanted to meet the author. Levi, in turn, had read only one of Roth’s books—Lamento di Portnoy—and therefore warily implored their mutual friend, Servadio, to come along as a translator and buffer. Both Servadio and Levi wrote for La Stampa, Levi’s hometown newspaper in Turin, and Levi also knew Servadio’s father, a fellow chemist whose mother had died at Auschwitz. As it happened, he and Roth got along famously: “Meeting with you was for me a supererogatory and unhoped for pleasure,” Levi wrote him afterward, “although hampered by language friction and by a noisy environment.”
A few months later, Roth traveled to Turin to interview Levi for The New York Times, since the latter’s Monkey’s Wrench was about to be published in the States. Roth asked his host to show him around the paint factory where he’d been employed as a research chemist—a vocation, Roth thought, reflected in certain aspects of Survival in Auschwitz, which showed how a man could be “broken down and, like a substance decomposing in a chemical reaction, lose his characteristic properties,” as Roth remarked during their interview. “Nothing belongs to us anymore,” Levi had written; “they have taken away our clothes, our shoes, even our hair; if we speak, they will not listen to us, and if they listen, they will not understand. They will even take away our name: and if we want to keep it, we will have to find in ourselves the strength to do so, to manage somehow so that behind the name something of us, of us as we were, still remains.” Toward the end of a three-day visit, La Stampa sent a photographer to capture the two writers chatting happily in Levi’s study; in another room of the house, Levi’s aged mother lay incapacitated, unwilling to let anybody but her son feed and care for her. Apart from that, Levi seemed content; he and Roth shared an emotional embrace on parting. “I don’t know which of us is the younger brother and which is the older brother,” said Levi. As Roth would later reflect, “I felt the great good fortune of one who believes himself to have made a most extraordinary new friend for life.”
Roth himself was about to begin a long spell of misery. In November he abruptly returned to London, canceling all further Counterlife publicity in New York. He’d thrown out his back a few weeks before, and now was taking the opioid Percodan every three or four hours, along with a cocktail of other medications including the muscle relaxant Robaxin. Alone in Connecticut, he couldn’t function otherwise; Sandy came from Chicago for a week or so to cook and care for him, but afterward Philip quickly deteriorated. “Halcion,” he wrote in his diary on October 9, referring to the sleeping pill he’d been given because of drug-related insomnia. “Hallucinations. Panic. Bad drug trip.” For a while he stopped taking the pill, though one night he was shaking and sweating so badly that he begged his neighbors the Grays to let him spend the night—a kindness for which he remained grateful even in the midst of later bitterness (“You’re welcome to be a boy again at any time in any room of the house,” Francine wrote him afterward). Finally, at the Wyndham in New York, Roth became so angst-ridden that Rieff had to keep him company until morning. “Throw the pills down the toilet,” Dr. Kleinschmidt advised, and Roth did as he was told, returning to London in an agony of panic and pain.
Within a few weeks he “felt something happen to [his] knee” while frog kicking in the Royal Automobile Club swimming pool, and soon he could walk only short distances—a dire situation: in the absence of beta-blockers, he was all the more dependent on exercise to keep his heart healthy. Meanwhile his companions on Fawcett Street took a dim view of his frailty. When he’d yelp with pain while managing the one step down into the kitchen, Bloom would exhort him with bluff English expressions like “Just get on with it!”—which at least were meant to encourage; once, while wretchedly recovering from food poisoning, he’d heard Anna call from the landing outside his bedroom door, “Is he still in there pissing and moaning?” “You’re in a POW camp,” Roth remembered telling himself, “and you have to take care of yourself.”
He was visiting his father, in March 1987, when he went to see an orthopedist at the Hospital for Special Surgery in New York; the man informed him that his knee pain was due to a medial meniscus tear that could be fixed with arthroscopic surgery taking less than an hour. Ecstatic at the prospect of relief—the man promised he’d be “back to exercising in a couple of weeks”—Roth promptly scheduled the procedure, arranging to recuperate for a few days in a spare room at the Ashers’ on West Eighty-sixth. The operation, however, was not a success. On discovering that Roth’s meniscus was, in fact, wholly intact, the surgeon decided to shave a bit of frayed cartilage on his femoral condyle (a procedure the Times would debunk as “a sham” in a front-page article fifteen years later). When it was over, Roth’s knee was so swollen he could hardly pull his trousers back on, and the pain was more excruciating than ever. Within a week he was barely able to walk, even with crutches, and once again he was prescribed Halcion—which “should be shunned like cyanide” by anyone prone to depression, as Styron would write in 1993, the year the pill was banned in England because of adverse effects known as “Halcion madness.”
In Doll’s House, Bloom remembered her first ominous glimpse of Roth on his return in late March—“grim and pale” in a wheelchair at Heath-row; for his part Roth remembered that she was angry with him for impugning her caretaking capacity by having his surgery in New York and relying on Linda and Aaron Asher afterward. Her first response to his suffering, as he saw it, was elaborate apathy: “As best I can understand,” he later wrote, “it was a way of denying that I was in physical trouble.” During a small dinner party they gave shortly after his return, Roth was in so much pain he had to excuse himself early in the evening and lie down upstairs with an ice bag on his knee; for hours he listened to Bloom chatting with their guests downstairs, but not once did she come up to check on him. “My career is over,” she cried, when he begged her to spend June with him in Connecticut. “I’ll have to spend the rest of my life caring for you.”
On April 11, 1987, a couple of weeks after his return to London, Roth was contacted by the Times: Primo Levi had just killed himself; did he have any comment? Roth was horrified. Though Levi had confessed a measure of dejection over his stroke-paralyzed mother, he’d otherwise seemed nothing but “vivacious” and “sound” only a few months before. Apparently, though, he’d begun to despair after prostate surgery left him at least temporarily incontinent, and meanwhile he’d revisited his Auschwitz nightmare in the book he finished shortly before his death, The Drowned and the Saved. Servadio remembered Roth was weeping and distraught when he came to her house in Pimlico that day, and for a long time afterward he fought with his own thoughts of suicide.
The last was among the most common symptoms of Halcion madness, along with a fear of being alone, both of which overwhelmed Roth when he returned that summer to Connecticut—where, as Bloom wrote, he “disintegrated before my eyes into a disoriented, terrified infant.” He clung to her, trembling, while they walked around the fields, and paddled around the pool with frantic slapping motions, begging her not to make him stay in the water. Conarroe visited in July and was struck by Bloom’s self-involvement (“It was all about her”) in the face of Roth’s desperation. “All hell broke loose late yesterday afternoon,” he wrote in his diary on July 20:
P[hilip] has been increasingly despondent, probably in part because C[laire] is leaving for L.A. on Tuesday. When I walk over to the house at 6:30 they were in front, having come from the pool. C went in and P was left standing outside, looking dazed. When I asked if he was OK he broke into sobs and said he couldn’t take it any more. We went into the kitchen & when she came down he asked her to stay. The next half-hour or so involved a terrible discussion, C in tears, P speaking quietly, trying to convince her that he was doing the best he can & needs patience from her—just as she asked it from him. C in tears, is terrified about not being able to go home—“I’ll have nothing to look forward to.” It all ended with rhetoric, C weepily saying she hoped she’d get sick and [be] taken care of. . . .
He spoke about his desire for oblivion—throwing himself out of the car, walking into Bantam Lake—and his utter sense of helplessness. Says if he goes back to London he’ll have a breakdown in his studio. Can’t stand the idea of the dinners with Anna. Expressed hurt that C, in London, & here, seems utterly insensitive to his situation. Sees himself as moving toward a breakdown with no place to turn—used the image of being in a maze & wherever he turns tears his flesh on nails. . . .
Actually Bloom vacillated between a panicky concern for her own welfare and “over-emotional” (her term) impulses to help—such as her impetuous idea to sell the house on Fawcett Street and look for an apartment with no stairs for Roth to climb. Sensing he’d disapprove of such an “excessive” response to what one hoped was a temporary setback, she hadn’t told him, and indeed he was furious when he overheard her, in Connecticut, discussing the matter with a real estate agent over the phone. “I felt unfairly misunderstood and just started screaming,” she remembered, running into the fields and refusing to come back inside. Finally, after they’d both calmed down a bit, Roth suggested they invite a friend of his, Bernard Avishai, to come stay for a week. “I am convinced that Bernie saved Philip’s life,” Bloom wrote.
Avishai had been twenty-five when he first met Roth, in 1974, around the time Avishai started writing about Israeli affairs for The New York Review of Books. When Bob Silvers asked him if there was anyone he wanted to meet in New York, Avishai named Roth (“half in jest”) and Silvers sent him forthwith to East Eighty-first Street; Roth gave the young man breakfast and listened to his life story—a grim tale about a mentally ill mother who died when Avishai was sixteen, a father who committed suicide five years later, etc. “Philip was tremendously empathic,” said Avishai. “I kept trying to steer the conversation to Jewish history, and he kept steering the conversation back to me.” Roth became a kind of older brother to Avishai, who shared his taste for Jewish shtick. “You do a courtesy flush?” Roth would call in a Yiddish accent when Avishai flushed the toilet, and the two also liked sharing titles for Jewish country and western songs: “I Balanced Your Books but You’re Breaking My Heart,” “The Second Time She Said Shalom I Knew She Meant Goodbye.”
When Avishai arrived in Connecticut, he was scarcely prepared for the “frightening” degree of Roth’s deterioration. When the two were alone together, Roth confided that he was in unbearable pain and thinking incessantly of suicide, and Avishai asked him what pills he was taking. Roth mentioned a few, adding Halcion almost as an afterthought, whereupon Avishai phoned an MIT psychopharmacologist who’d helped him with his own benzodiazepine problem. The man directed Roth to stop taking the drug immediately, though cold-turkey withdrawal wasn’t easy (“the ordeal verges on being beyond description in its nearly unalleviated anguish,” Styron wrote); he told Roth to take a small dose of Valium the first night, a smaller dose the second, and none the third. Meanwhile Avishai would spend all three nights with Roth in a spare room with twin beds. “My first reaction was distrust,” Bloom wrote of the situation in Doll’s House. “I didn’t know Bernie well at the time, and was extremely protective of Philip.” “Malarkey,” Roth retorted. “Her unmistakable first reaction was anger, jealousy, and fear at believing herself to have been displaced by Bernie because of her inadequacies.” That was pretty much the way Avishai remembered it, too, though he thought it “natural” for Bloom to feel hurt. At any rate he mostly managed to stay awake with Roth for three long nights, while Roth “learned the meaning of ‘climbing the walls,’ ” as he later remarked.
“I’ve had a helluva summer, the worst I can remember,” Roth wrote Kazin the day of Avishai’s departure, July 28. “I’m only just beginning to feel better, and tonight is the first night in four months that I’ve sat at my desk writing letters. I haven’t written a word of anything else.” The next day he and Bloom departed for a two-week visit with the Styrons on Martha’s Vineyard, where Roth began to feel a bit more like himself again. At a dinner party attended by Roth and other friends, Bob Brustein mentioned that Styron had recently sent him an old photograph of their children, Alexandra Styron (then age four) and Daniel Brustein (six), tied up back to back in chairs by Styron’s older son, Tommy; a TV repairman came to Brustein’s house, and the photo was missing after the man departed. Soon Brustein was visited by a couple of detectives who wanted to know if he enjoyed abusing children, and Brustein had to get the twenty-two-year-old Alexandra on the phone to attest to his innocence. “Innocent?!” Roth erupted. “Ohhh no . . .” He began cross-examining Brustein about his sex life (“the funniest thirty or forty minutes I’ve ever been involved in,” Brustein recalled), amid howling laughter from all the guests but one: “I look at Claire,” said Joanna Clark, “and she is turning paler and paler and paler.” Suddenly Bloom rushed outside, where she could be seen pacing about until Roth ended his spiel and joined her; the two stood remonstrating outside the window.
The next day they joined the Clarks for lunch in Menemsha. As Blair and Philip walked ahead, discussing politics, Joanna overheard an exchange between Bloom and the Clarks’ fourteen-year-old son, Ian, trailing a little behind: “So what’s wrong with Philip’s knee?” the boy politely inquired. “The doctors say it’s nothing,” Bloom replied. “That’s what’s wrong with Philip. There’s always something wrong. He always complains . . .”
THAT FALL a specialist in New York recommended an exercise program for Roth’s knee, and gradually he could walk again without too much pain. That left the problem of living in London. After ten years he was beginning to feel like a stranger in both places, London and New York, and figured it was only a matter of time before such disconnection affected his work. Roth had “little or nothing to say” about a country whose inner workings he knew only vaguely; in The Counterlife he’d managed to evoke an aspect of English life that vexed him—anti-Semitism—but this “tiny slice” had to be amalgamated with aspects of Israel and America. “I knew that I wasn’t likely to be able to pull another rabbit out of that hat however much longer I remained in London,” he said, “and that if I did stay on there I would soon find myself without a strong enough hold on any subject, English or American, to activate my writing energy.”
Also, he was getting “awfully bored (bored more than anything)”—as he wrote his principal nemesis, Harold Pinter—with having to defend Reagan’s “Amerika” from the “half-baked” attacks of liberal English friends. Roth chafed at their glee whenever his home country was a victim of terror, or struggled to prop up some right-wing regime, and was adamant in his defense of Reagan’s bombing raid against Libya on April 14, 1986. “You’re going to love being a Yank here post-Libya,” Roth warned his friend Julius Goldstein, who was moving to Sussex after marrying an English writer, Joan Aiken. “You’ll forget all about being a Yid—they’ve got a new reason to hate you that supersedes the other.” Pinter, who’d been relatively apolitical when Roth first met him, became obsessed with American foreign policy toward Nicaragua in particular, and would invariably bait Roth while in his cups. A story was widely circulated that the two had argued so violently at a party that Alfred Brendel, seated nearby, was fearful lest they come to blows and land on the great pianist’s hands—though Brendel himself emended the record, pointing out that while Pinter was certainly wont to lose control (“as he got more excited his vocabulary shrunk even more”), Roth only became more calmly sarcastic. “I am still meditating about Harold Pinter’s outbursts,” Stephen Spender wrote Roth, after such an argument had all but spoiled Spender’s birthday luncheon. “He is very like his writing, I think, in producing effects which make one think one is not understanding what he is saying and he is not understanding what one is saying.”‡
Most Sundays, toward the end of that problematic decade in London, Roth would commiserate over breakfast with another unhappy American Jew, the artist R. B. Kitaj, at Tootsie’s, an American-style diner on Fulham Road. Roth had met Kitaj (pronounced Kit-EYE) through David Plante; the small bearded artist was one of the great draftsmen of his time, and would fax Roth dashed-off sketches of the decorous Anita Brookner, say, giving blow jobs. Roth was full of curiosity about Kitaj’s youth as a sailor on a merchant ship, brothel-hopping at various ports, experiences Roth would bestow on Mickey Sabbath. Theirs was the kind of nonrivalrous camaraderie Roth had enjoyed with Philip Guston, who’d died in 1980; Kitaj and Roth, too, were of like eminence in their respective fields, and both relished the kitschier aspects of American culture. They also shared a morbid awareness of English anti-Semitism, and Kitaj would invoke his friend as a witness when critics savaged his last major exhibition at the Tate, in 1994: “There are many people,” Kitaj wrote, “including Isaiah Berlin and Philip Roth, who have confirmed an ongoing, low-octane English anti-Semitism in polite and not-so-polite London circles.” When Kitaj’s beloved wife, Sandra, died of a brain aneurysm around this time, he blamed the English press and returned to America with their son. “Roth is a good listener and he and I talked often on the phone when Sandra died,” he wrote in his diary on December 21, 2003, four years before killing himself after he’d received a diagnosis of Parkinson’s disease.
Roth’s life in London had been “sustained,” he said, by his affair with Emma Smallwood; otherwise he would have begun living year-round in Connecticut sometime in the early eighties, letting Bloom visit whenever she felt like it. Neither he nor Emma could quite remember, later, why it ended in 1986 or thereabouts, except that both seemed to realize it had “nowhere to go”: Emma wasn’t willing to leave her unhappy home (mainly because of her daughter), and neither was Roth (for whatever reason).§ They met only once more, for tea at the Ritz, during Roth’s last-ever trip to London in 1990—a conversation Roth re-created in Deception as having taken place over the phone. Emma was rather cold on that occasion, complaining that her friends had recognized her as Maria in The Counterlife. (Roth: “I said ‘How?’ And she said, ‘That’s the way I talk. How do you do that?’ ” Roth chuckled: “That’s the Nobel Prize.”) As the mistress in Deception complains, “I object greatly to this taking people’s lives and putting them into fiction. And then being a famous author who resents critics for saying that he doesn’t make things up.”
In September 1987, a couple of weeks after their visit with the Styrons on Martha’s Vineyard, Roth and Bloom began living in a small suite at the Essex House on Central Park South. (“Philip Roth is coming back to New York,” the Post’s Page Six reported, noting that his most recent novel “finds a horde of anti-Semites among the British upper crust.”) Bloom “went crazy” when he’d first broached the idea with her, and later, at the Essex, made little effort to dissemble her gloom. Once again Roth promised to put ten thousand dollars aside in a “travel fund,” to be replenished as needed, so she could visit Anna as often as she liked. But neither would budge on the essential point: Bloom was unwilling to live in Connecticut, and Roth was unwilling to live in London. Almost every morning at the Essex House she’d wake up crying, while Roth would go for a swim next door at the New York Athletic Club (as a guest of Bloom’s friend Gore Vidal) and phone Sandy in Chicago: “She’s crying again,” he’d sigh, “and I don’t know what to do with her. . . .” Bloom’s therapist had advised her to leave Roth, who phoned the woman from the Essex one day and said, “I’m sitting here looking out the window”—i.e., at a view of Central Park—“and I don’t see what’s so awful.” But a visiting friend wrote in his diary that the “impersonal hotel room” was a “depressing arrangement”: “Claire, in dark glasses, was in a crabby mood. They were bickering over what movie to see that night.”
THE ROMANIAN WRITER Norman Manea—who would become one of Roth’s closest friends—first made contact with Roth at the beginning of 1987, when he was spending a year in West Berlin as a fellow at the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (German Academic Exchange Service, or DAAD). Manea spoke very little English at the time, so his letter to Roth was translated (from German) by a British colleague at DAAD. Manea reminded the editor of Writers from the Other Europe that the series was devoid of Romanians, and that recently their friend Aharon Appelfeld had sent Roth a couple of Manea’s stories—the only two translated into English. Manea added that his present circumstances, as a writer and a Jew, were such that returning to Ceauşescu’s Romania wasn’t really an option: “What does an unknown writer of fifty, who writes in this exotic language nobody knows, do?”
Manea and Appelfeld had in common a bleak childhood, which in Manea’s case had become an almost equally bleak adulthood. Like Appelfeld he’d been deported as a boy, in 1941, to a Transnistria concentration camp, and later wrote fiction about how the trauma of the Holocaust was revived by life in a totalitarian state—a life that had become all but untenable after 1981, when Manea protested Romanian anti-Semitism and called for stronger moral stands on the parts of his fellow writers. “At 55,” Roth would write of his friend in 1992, “Norman Manea is a plumpish, balding, melancholy man in dark-rimmed spectacles—mild, reserved, anxious, at times a bit timid. He does not strike even himself, I believe, as the ideal writer to have been pitted against perhaps the most vicious dictatorship of the last 40 years.” Because Manea refused to bow to his country’s cretinous leader—with “his ridiculous, self-awarded, ever more pompous titles,” Manea wrote, “his endless speeches full of past platitudes with their perennial hoarse bathos”—he was not only forbidden to publish, but also forced to surrender his typewriter every night “to some central headquarters,” as Roth recalled while telling his favorite Norman story: “He went to visit an older friend of his, a wise man, and told him the situation. The wise man said to him: ‘Look, Norman: how many readers does a writer really need, when you think about it? . . . Six. You need six. You have six readers, that’s fine. You, unfortunately, have only four.’ ”
In 1987, Roth wasn’t sure what to do with Manea’s two translated stories, though he encouraged the desperate man to come see him if he managed to visit the States. As luck would have it, Manea’s DAAD grant was followed by a Fulbright that brought him to Catholic University in Washington, D.C., and Manea promptly arranged to visit Roth at the Essex House. “We have hands!” said Roth, when Manea warned him, over the phone, that his English was poor and maybe he should come another time. “It was uncomfortable for me to face this great Jewish American cowboy,” he explained. “I was like a little beggar from Eastern Europe.” Still, they managed to have a few laughs right from the start. Manea was unsure whether to live in Paris or remain in America, and Roth was determined it should be the latter; he took Manea for a walk among the milling hordes of Broadway, on the Upper West Side, leading him to Fairway Market so he could see for himself the superabundant fruits and vegetables piled outside. When Manea returned to Washington (where he was taking an English class “with old Chinese ladies and beautiful young Brazilian girls”), Roth phoned him almost daily to see how he was making out.
Manea’s wife, Cella, had been chief of the art and paper restoration division of the Bucharest National Library and Museum, and, after Norman’s Fulbright expired, Cella found work at an art conservation company in New York and the couple moved into a “very shabby” hotel on Eighth Avenue. Meanwhile Roth got in touch with his friend Leon Botstein, the president of Bard College, who promptly made Manea an international fellow for that academic year, inaugurating a happy career at the college that would continue the rest of his life. In 1990, Roth agreed to serve as a nominator for the MacArthur “genius” fellowships, scribbling on a letter of thanks from the program director, “Norman eligible?” “I can think of no writer of the first rank in such dire need of moral encouragement and financial support as is Norman Manea,” he wrote the MacArthur committee, which awarded Manea an annual sum of $50,000 for five years. Roth also put him up for a Guggenheim, and arranged for him to meet Joel Conarroe, by then the president of the foundation, over dinner one night. Manea hadn’t known what a MacArthur was, and was just as puzzled about Guggenheims, and certainly had no insight into the president’s private life. “At a certain point,” he recalled, “the discussion reached the problem of homosexuals. . . . I said I don’t have any problem with this. I don’t look at what other people do in their room and their bed. . . . Was this my exam for the Guggenheim? Perhaps not the essential one, a marginal one, but I passed it.” Loaded with grant money, Manea still couldn’t afford the one-bedroom apartment in a nice doorman building on West Seventieth Street that Roth wanted him to buy, so Roth contributed $20,000 and also wrote a letter to the co-op board.
In 1994, Roth accompanied Manea to the Federal Building in downtown Manhattan, and insisted on sitting next to him in the roped-off area where hundreds of happy immigrants, along with Manea, took the oath of citizenship. Afterward Roth and Manea had a celebratory lunch at an Italian restaurant in Greenwich Village, where Manea told “convoluted and ironic stories” about his desperate life in Romania. “I kept laughing and saying, ‘Norman, go home and write that down,’ ” said Roth, “meanwhile remembering the day back at my hotel when he had so little English at his disposal and so much doubt and trepidation and no idea at all of the success he would make of life in America.”